Irgendjemand musste die Täter ja bestrafen

Jewish revenge and Jewish resistance - a repressed chapter of German memory culture. As a descendant of Holocaust survivors, Achim Doerfer embarks on a quest for a feeling that, after the end of National Socialism and its gigantic crimes, remained strangely muted not only in his family: the desire for retribution, for revenge. It is no coincidence that the jubilation at the Tel Aviv premiere of Quentin Tarantino's film "Inglourious Basterds" was immense: finally, an artistic fantasy that portrayed Jews as powerful. But there was also resistance and acts of revenge in reality: in the ghettos of Eastern Europe, among Jewish partisan groups, and in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army. Even though, in light of the massive genocide perpetrated by the Nazis, there should have been much more: Achim Doerfer investigates these stories of resistance and revenge to counter a culture of memory and commemoration that cements the victim status of Jews in all our minds. Especially since the failure of the German judiciary after 1945 was no less enormous: Doerfer meticulously lists how the perpetrators were systematically protected, how millions of victims were denied any justice - and thus ultimately no societal perspective in post-war Germany, neither in West Germany nor in East Germany. The bitter realization of this brilliant, angry, and thought-provoking book is that with the mass reintegration of the perpetrators, the much-discussed and celebrated reconciliation between Germans and Jews has remained, to this day, an undignified theater of remembrance.